Love, Musicals: Beauty and the Beast (Dir Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1h33m, 1991)

 
It's February 19th, 1992, and something unprecedented in the history of the Oscars has happened: Alongside Oliver Stone's JFK and John Demme's Silence of the Lambs, for the first time in the Academy's history, an animated film has been nominated for Best Picture. The film's name is Beauty and the Beast. Cinema has long been enamoured with the tale, from Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946) onwards, to 2021's anime incarnation, Belle, there have been nearly a dozen adaptions, not including the multiple adaptions of King Kong that have been released over the years. Few have become as beloved as the 1991 animated adaption=, in which the love story between Belle (Paige O'Hara) and the Beast (Robby Benson) is writ large as a Broadway-esque musical of love against the odds.

Beauty and the Beast had followed Disney as a studio for a while; Walt himself had attempted to adapt the film twice, once in the 1930s, and again in the 1950s, by which time Cocteau's version had put him off further attempts at the idea, the second half of the film troubling Disney in particular. It was only in the aftermath of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a film often overlooked at being the start of Disney's Renaissance when compared to The Little Mermaid (1989), key in rejuvenating the company's animation department, that they, now under the control of Jeremy Katzenberg, began to explore the idea of adapting the fairytale once more, for the first time having the film fully scripted rather than worked out on storyboards by American screenwriter and playwright Linda Woolverton, who would later adapt her own work for Broadway.

"There must be more than this": Belle (Paige O'Hara) is not just a break from previous Disney heroines, but a template for the heroines to come

With the animator Richard Williams turning the project down for his long-in-development passion project, The Thief and the Cobbler, and with a serious take helmed by Williams' friend, Richard Purdum, turned down, Disney had to turn to new talent, in the form of Trousdale and Wise. Returning from The Little Mermaid would be Alan Menken, and Howard Ashman, reluctantly putting aside his pet project Aladdin, and who would die from complications of AIDS before the film released, and months before the film was completed. Unconsciously or not, Ashman's lyrics, and his mortality, colour the film, and give its overtones of time running out, visually represented by a red rose deep in the Beast's chambers in the castle.

Beauty and the Beast is Disney's renaissance style on a Broadway scale. We begin with cinematic language familiar to any fan of the original Walt Disney helmed films: this is storybook imagery, as we are told of how the curse befell the Beast, and how only true love can break it, before Ashman and Menkin's master-stroke. If Little Mermaid took cues from the Broadway musical in its structure, this is them perfecting it; "Belle" is a note-perfect introduction to our heroine, her surroundings in 18th Century France, her eccentricity-at least in the eyes of the disapproving locals-as a reader, her dreams of adventure, and her would-be suitor, in the form of braggadocio and local hunter, Gaston (Richard White). It's quickly followed by perhaps the best example of the musical staple "I Want" song with "Belle (Reprise)". Both have far more, musically, to do with the openings of musicals like Oklahoma than any previous Disney film's score and songs.

Belle herself is also something new for the studio: with the exception of The Little Mermaid's Ariel, Belle is by far the most independent and resourceful of the studio's musical heroines, imbued with a sweetness by O'Hara. She will need it: the boorish Gaston, whilst constantly rebuffed, has designs to make her his wife, and, her father going missing whilst travelling, she is soon herself trapped as a prisoner of the Beast (Benson), whose gruff exterior and fearsome demeanour belies a figure quickly running out of time, whose servants, also transformed worry for him and their fate. All the while, Gaston, and the village who regard him as a hero, including his foppish sidekick, LeFou (Jesse Corti), plot the beast's downfall. It is the relationship between Belle and the Beast, though, that drives the film.

A Tale as Old as Time: Beauty and the Beast is carried by its central duo as much as any song or sequence

Here, the film's shots, and cinematic language liberally build upon other versions of the Beast; Benson's voice is perhaps the most notable new element, whilst the appearance mixes elements of Jean Marais in Cocteau's 1946 edition, and the Cannon Films 1987 film. Where the film is at its freshest, and most memorable is the relationship with Belle. Initially confrontational, threatening to lock her away and banishing her from the castle, their relationship slowly develops over the rest of the film from dismissal to slowly blooming love, bonding in a wordless sequence over tiny gestures like feeding birds, as much as great ones as the Beast grants Belle the run of his expansive library. In perhaps the ultimate example of Ashman's philosophy of "when you're too emotional to speak, you sing, and when you're too emotional to sing, you dance", their relationship is developed as much through songs ("Something There" and the Angela Lansbury-sung title song) as dialogue, leading to perhaps one of the great shots of any Disney film-as well as the studio's first of many syntheses of CGI and animation-with one of their greatest on-screen couples, in their ballroom dance.

It is easy to lose sight of why Beauty and the Beast remains beloved: alongside The Lion King (1994) it's the film of Disney's First Renaissance: it is the film that the second Renaissance, beginning with Tangled (2010) but best seen in Frozen (2013) most emulates, from its resourceful heroines to its Broadway aping score, unsullied by live action remakes, musicals, anniversary celebrations, and the usual avalanche of merchandise and ephemera that accompanies every Disney release. Only one animated film, Up (2009), also focusing on finding joy in the fleeting fragility of life, this time in old age, has since joined it as a Best Picture nominee. Without hyperbole, it is something special in the studio's history, a film arguably only matched by Walt at his more imperial of ambitions, best seen in Sleeping Beauty (1959). Simply, though, Disney have never, and probably may never create a love story as perfectly crafted as this tale, a film in which the studio's animation, music and storytelling powers were at their greatest to tell their definitive tale of magic and love

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Beauty and the Beast is available to stream via Disney+, and on DVD and BluRay from Walt Disney Studios. It is also currently available via these platforms in the United States

Next week, to Paris, the city of love, in Baz Lurmann's opulent Moulin Rouge!